Hiring a CFO might seem redundant when your business is still in its infancy. But if your company has successfully navigated the start-up stage, is experiencing middle-market growth, or has even gone on to become an international business, bringing a CFO on board will be necessary.
Unlike controllers, who are process-driven, project-focused, and historical thinking, CFOs can help with the complexities of your finances and the strategic planning you need to take your company to the next level. They have the knowledge and expertise that reaches beyond what your bookkeeper, accountant or controller can manage.
Your company is ready to hire a CFO if you are wondering how to provide financial advice to your company’s principals, the efficacy of your financial analysis and reporting, managing risk, and creating financial tools, systems, and processes.
If you’re concerned about overhead, a fractional CFO will be able to adapt their dedication to what your organization really needs.
Differences between a Controller and CFO
Business owners and executives need to understand the difference between a CFO and a Controller if they think they need to add a CFO to their finance managing teams. The differences lie in:
Project-Focused vs. Bigger Picture
A CFO has complete insight and a full view of the organization, which gives them a broad perspective of threats and opportunities that allows for their forward-thinking mindset. Your CFO can maintain such a perspective because the Controller provides accurate financial reports used to determine your organization’s previous successes. The accountant also participates in data analysis and audit projects, helping the CFO to stay focused on his or her broad perspective.
Process-Driven vs. Project-Driven
Controllers are typically more structured and tend to follow the necessary processes that help them generate the information a CFO needs.
Tasks like managing the accumulation and consolidation of all financial data necessary for an accurate accounting of consolidated business results are typically handled by a controller. They also coordinate and prepare internal and external financial statements.
The CFO focuses on planning and budgeting to maximize shareholder value, protect company investments, control costs, and project profits while the controller may help to support these more strategic tasks.
Historical-thinking vs. Forward-thinking
CFOs play a vital role integrating with the board of directors, vice president, and other C-suite members to implement long-term, large-scale actions (e.g., capital investment, fundraising, capital structure, financial planning, and succession planning).
Controllers also play a crucial role in those actions by providing reports that the CFO needs in order to evaluate current financial results and predict future ones. Also, they’ll take an important role in sales and payroll, while potentially helping with the audit process (both internal and external) and corporate development.
Tactics vs. Strategy
Both tactics and strategy are essential to build and run a successful, growing company. In a small or family business, controllers usually focus on short-term, small, tactical actions that can improve current results. They are able to detect and correct inefficiencies that impact the short-term goals, but they rarely focus on the long-term outlook.
On the other hand, CFOs use their experience, knowledge, and tactics to focus on financial planning and executing broad growth initiatives.
What a CFO Can Do for Your Organization That a Controller Can’t
Business owners and executives need to balance attention to the organization’s past while making plans for future growth. In the world of finance, Controller are responsible for taking care of the company’s past, including balancing books and creating reports. CFOs are concerned with the future – creating forecasts, strategies, and paving ways to achieve them.
CFOs can help set up a budget and forecasting function, as well as compare actual results with the forecast results to understand where, why, and how your company could be performing better. They can also make strategic decisions at each growth stage, determine cash needs, track the performance of each strategic objective, and maximize the value of your organization.
Professionalizing your finance function also includes building trusted investor relations, which can’t be done by your accounting team alone. CFOs have the communication skills and ability to create reporting packages and KPI dashboards that can bring investor relations to the next level. They will accurately track your cash flows, optimize the ways you use it, and identify alternative funding sources.
Signs You Need a CFO
Both earlier stage startups and mature enterprises benefit from an experienced CFO. The cost of delaying a new CFO hire is always high when it is too late to do it (when you’re about to launch a key funding round or are in a crisis scenario). The following signs will help you know whether you are ready or even overdue.
1. You are concerned about risk management
If you are unsure whether you have the right risk management strategy in place, it is time to hire a strategic financial leader. An experienced CFO can monitor your plans and strategy and provide timely advice and remediations to potential red flags before they become glaring issues.
In case of a downturn, many leadership teams crumble under the pressure to make quick and effective decisions. The modern CFO stays one step ahead of changing market dynamics, particularly when it comes to sensing a downturn or recession, responding, and leading the recovery.
2. Investors request more detailed information
Do your principal investors want more information than what you are giving them? They may want to review everything from your internal financial controls to essential KPIs like customer churn or ARR as they decide whether they should or shouldn’t invest in your organization.
A CFO can make the entire process easier for you because he or she will know what potential investors want to see and how to prepare the right reports.
3. You’re experiencing difficulties with the audit process
As your company grows, third-parties will require audited financial statements at some point. Conducting such audits means additional scrutiny of your organization’s finances, which can be intimidating and overwhelming (especially to business owners and executives who don’t specialize in finance).
To make your audits cheaper and easier to manage, your CFO can create and monitor finance and accounting systems with internal controls. When it’s time for an audit, a CFO can oversee it, allowing you to deal with your daily operations without stress.
4. You are growing rapidly
The CFO will ensure that the company has conducted thorough market research to support financial projections and assumptions. The best CFOs stay ahead of market trends and know how to use customer data to identify new business opportunities and manage the risk associated with quick growth.
Historically, finance was regarded as a function designed to support other business units, rather than an integral part of a company’s overall strategy and success.
Today, finance functions are expanding and transforming to drive better business results. Having a finance expert to drive the necessary changes has become imperative for companies that want a competitive advantage on the market.
Ready to Make the Leap? Consero Can Help.
Recognizing the signs that you need a CFO is the first step — acting on them is what sets high-growth companies apart. Whether you need hands-on strategic financial leadership or a stronger back-office foundation to support it, Consero has you covered.
With Consero’s CFO Advisory Services, you gain access to experienced financial leaders who can step in at any stage of growth to provide the strategic guidance, investor-ready reporting, and risk management expertise your business demands — without the overhead of a full-time executive hire.
And with Finance as a Service (FaaS), Consero delivers a fully optimized finance and accounting function — scalable teams, proven processes, and purpose-built software — so your CFO can focus on strategy instead of getting buried in back-office operations. The result is audit-friendly financials, better visibility, and a shorter path to results than building everything in-house.
Together, we offer the complete financial leadership and infrastructure your business needs to scale with confidence. Contact Consero today to find out which solution is right for your stage of growth.
